The problem that the Ultra-Orthodox pose for Israel is not a new topic, either here or elsewhere, but this WSJ piece by Evan Goldstein is worth reading, not least for the insight into the way that welfare handouts have (for all practical purposes) distorted an ancient religious tradition:
At the root of the disaster is the revolutionary idea that the study of Torah is a vocation. There is no precedent in pre-1948 Jewish history for an entire community devoting itself to Torah scholarship—and certainly no precedent for getting paid to do so.
“Torah study has always been for spiritual, not material, sustenance,” Zvi Zohar, a professor of law at Bar-Ilan University, tells me. Moreover, the notion that a man’s primary obligation is studying, and not providing for his family, is “diametrically opposed” to Jewish tradition, Mr. Zohar says. The Shulchan Aruch, for instance, an influential 16th-century legal code written by Rabbi Joseph Caro, states: “A respected and impoverished scholar should have a trade, even a lowly trade, rather than being in need of his fellow man.”
State-supported Torah study has also harmed the quality of Jewish thought, argues Mr. Naeh. Ultra-Orthodox self-segregation has cut “learning off from life,” he wrote in a recent essay. As a result, the current generation of Torah scholars “is far from being one of the greatest . . . despite the existence of tens of thousands of learners.”
Is there nothing that government cannot mess up?
Their purpose is to make large numbers of Jewish babies so Jews do not become a minority in Israel the way whites are going to become in the US.
Is the Israeli court ruling antisemitic?
Randall Parker you are not doing it right. It is the white people on welfare that will make the most babies. They will be as horrible at math as you are.
There’s no rational reason to blame “government” for this rather than the Orthodox community itself.